About the Author

Sarah is co-director of Malvolio. She brings her creative skills to the business, and loves concept development in commercial projects, illustration, and working on various self-initiated paper craft projects in her spare time.

Did you know that we can also help you and your business with Google Adwords lead generation campaigns? We were approached by Benton Insurance Services to develop a turn-key ‘lead generating’ solution for their business.

Farm Insurance Online was founded and we worked closely with Benton Insurance Services to create a Google Adwords campaign that delivers potential leads from Google search directly into a website which we custom developed. The website captures critical lead generating data about the customer before being transmitted directly into Benton Insurance Services business systems for immediate staff follow-up and potential business transaction.

If you’re looking for something like this to help give your business a bit of a boost, feel free to chat to us to see how we can help.

Western Port Metal Recyclers look after all things scrap metal in Hastings.

With only an old business card that had seen better days, they decided it was time for a revamp. As the business has been in existence for quite a long time, we designed a retro logo, with a bit of a rough touch – after all, they handle scrap metal every day, and there’s not many smooth edges in all that metal!

To create a consistent brand, the following items were created: a letterhead for invoices, a business card with some space for notes on the back, and a magnet to remind people who to call when they’ve got metal to dispose of.

Slimuline were launching a new charity – called ProTeen Australia – and needed help to get their branding in line for the launch.

Slimuline had an existing logo, but minimal stationery for promoting the brand. So we started by designing and printing a professional letterhead, with compliments slips and business cards. The business cards featured Slimuline and ProTeen Australia.

For the official launch of ProTeen Australia, a trade pack was also designed, comprising of a short series of pages about Slimuline, the products, and ProTeen Australia. These were placed into a folder to hand out at expos and events.

Lovely words from Danielle, the owner of Slimuline: “It’s been such a pleasure to work with you and learn from you, you have made this so much easier for me than I could have hoped for. I really appreciate all your work, you have proven to be a total gem.”

For those of you who are local to Somerville, you may have noticed that our big accountants in town have recently had a make-over! New name, new branding, new signage…new everything. We are the designers behind the new brand.

But the one important thing I stress about branding? Keep consistent. So for LBW Advisory, even more importantly as they have a number of staff, a style guide for use within their office was developed. A style guide is a handy reference tool so you don’t have to guess colours, fonts or anything else relevant to the brand.

A common issue in print design: too much content and not enough space.

The typical solutions are editing content so it’s shorter, or going for a bigger sized brochure/poster/booklet. But sometimes we need to think sideways – sometimes, a larger document size isn’t available, or the content can’t be cut down any further. So what happens then?

This is where a key (or legend) often comes in handy. Keys and legends aren’t only used on maps, they can be used to categorise all kinds of information. Icons and colours are common elements that are used.

For the A Gender Agenda calendar, we were limited by space (A4 page) and had a set amount of events we had to make space for. A legend made up of colours worked best to save us space in this design. It also has the added benefit of being easy to quickly find events in each category. Design can be used in clever ways.

For a collective of restaurants in Mornington, we created “Birthday Club” stationery – which include discounts and prizes throughout the year.

Each business – The Winey Cow, Mi Mexiko and Thanks Albert, have different colours and brands – so whilst the style of the poster was consistent, we changed the colours to match each restaurant.

Along with the posters, generic cards were designed for people to write their details on to join the Birthday Club quickly and easily (usually in the short time waiting for their food or coffee order to be made!).

Last year, we designed a range of flyers for Melbourne Jewish Book Week, for small events they are running separately to their main festival coming up this year. We set up a template design that was easily used across a variety of events, which kept branding consistent.